At Long Last, with a Little Help from my Bernina 770QE

I started my gull quilt, Dinner for Four, over two years ago, but lots of life got in the way.  My father got sick and died, my husband and I took a two month road trip, later we went to France for two months.  The half-finished gulls were left pinned to the wall for ages.  I bought a new sewing machine, a Bernina 770 QE In January, and that refueled my motivation.  I'll write more about my machine later.  

The quilt still isn't finished...it needs to be quilted and bound, but today I stitched the last waves to the watery background.  Whew.

I plan to embellish around the fronts of the birds with cheese cloth to make the water splash like I did on my whale quilt.

The birds. Are raw-edge pieces glued with glue stick to a heavily starched muslin backing.

  The water is turned edge strips of black and gray fabrics that will be enhanced with various threads when I quilt the piece.  I,m thinking of working metalic threads in for a watery sparkle...not sure of that yet though.  The background is not glued or stitched to a backing fabric as I find that makes it harder to keep everything flat when I quilt it.  I used a turned edge applique process for that.

 My technique for turned edge applique is to glue each piece to the next along the quarter-inch seam line before stitching the seams with a blind hem stitch.  I use washable, bottled school glue for this .  Below a section of the water is being constructed.  The pattern is drawn on freezer paper.  I cut the pattern piece out, iron it to the right side of the fabric, then cut the fabric roughly a quarter inch from the paper.  The edges that will be on top are turned, those that tuck under are left raw edged.  I dampen the edge I am turning with sprach starch by painting the spray starch on with a foam beush.  (Spray the starch into a cup to get enough to paint on the fabric.

This shows the back of the fabric being "painted" with spray starch.  The freezer paper side is face down.  After wetting the fabric with the starch, i pull the fabric to the back along the edge of the freezer paper, and iron it down.  No reversing of the pattern is needed this way, and the pattern piece can be put back in the space it came out of, and fit perfectly.

At least it can be put back and fit perfectly, IN THEORY.   Well, back at it, and hopefully I'll finish this piece before I am shuffled off to the Shady Rest.

Traveling Art

Even though I've been in France for almost two months, some of my art pieces have been making their own journeys here and there.

 My piece, Requiem for 10,000 Trees has been traveling in a Studio Art Quilter's Association trunk show.    I've pretty much lost track of it for now through my shoddy record keeping.  Eventually, it is to go to the National Quilt Museum to become part of the permanent collection in 2017.  Two other quilts have been on exhibit at the Orcas Center--close to home.  One of them, Return to the Elwah, commemorating the ermoval of two dams on the Elwah River, sold during the exhibit for a pretty penny.

I haven't made a quilted piece in more than a year, mostly because I've been traveling and focusing on sketching. I have some pieces in my studio that are half finished, and when I return home, I plan to at least finish those two pieces before I start anything else.  ( Promise to self.)

And my largest piece, Farewell to Ruffles, sold at the Houston Quilt show a few years ago.  That has always felt very odd to me.  It sold, I got a large check from the Houston Show Organizers , but I have no idea who bought the piece or why.  I guess I should have exhibited it "not for sale", but I didn't realize until it was gone that I was pretty attached to the piece.  At least with the Elwah piece, I know who the the buyer is, and know that she is an environmentalist and advocate for Marine ecologies, so I'm glad she liked the piece and bought it.

Playing Hooky from Quilting with Sketchbook Skool

Me sketching on our recent road trip

If I'm not making art of some sort, I feel out of sorts...as though I haven't brushed my teeth or had my morning coffee, so when my husband and I bought a van and converted it to a camper (see PromastertoCamper.blogspot.com) I was happy about the idea of hitting the open road once again, but in a bit of a panic about having a portable art form.  I have 300 square feet of studio space that is bursting at the seams...how could I begin to take a project on the road?

Messy pages from an old studio sketchbooks

Enter Sketchbook Skool.  Danny Gregory and Koosje Koene conceived the idea of bringing together a cadre of skilled sketchbook artisits to teach sketchbooking techniques online.  I've kept a sketchbook/journal for decades, but my sketchbooks are a messy place where I dash out ideas that might one day become a quilt, scribble ideas I don't want to forget, and just doodle.  For me a sketchbook has been a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.  Although I've always envied the beautifully composed sketchbooks of people like Cathy Johnson, Gabriel Campanario, and lots of others that I can't think of right off the top of my head, I've never tried to make one myself..





So, when I stumbled on Sketchbook Skool back in March of this year, I realized I could up my game in sketchbooking, and have a portable art form to take on the road.  I didn't need to buy ANYTHING since I've been a compulsive buyer of pens, pencils, paints and sketchbooks since I was old enough to get an allowance,

Thanks to Sketchbook Skool, I'm sketching daily, which is bound to improve my art quilting, to say nothing of the quality of my sketchbooks, and sketching is so portable!    I haven't really found my style yet; I love watercolor, but the paper in my Moleskine journal doesn't love watercolor.  The paint just sits in a puddle on the surface and has to be scrubbed into the paper, but my rule is finish one journal before starting another, so I persist.   I'm really enjoying the process, even though I have some unfinished quilt pieces that are calling my name.  I should get back to my studio, but first I want to sketch just a little more!

SAQA Food for Thought....

SAQA, the Studio Art Quilters Association, has a call out for entries to their upcoming exhibit called Food for Thought.

I have been struggling all week with a composition depicting farmed salmon.  I have been making Japanese-style fish prints on rather unnatural looking colored fabrics because I want the fish to  look manufactured.  I plan cross the fish with heavy black lines representing bars of the cage, and to have the water within and below the cage to look like toxic waste--because it is.

I've experimented with printing the fish on dry and damp fabric, using screen printing ink, acrylic paint and India ink.  The ink gives the very best print.  I'm using a rubber fish from Dick Blick, so fortunately, I don't have to worry about having a rotting fish in my studio.

I have also been toying with the idea of carving a stamp and printing a fish skeleton over the fish print to give a sort of x-ray effect, but my first attempts at that have fallen short, and I'm running out of time. The SAQA deadline is September 30th, but we are leaving on a trip September 20th, so I have to be finished, and photographed by then...eek.

I also want the water below the cage to look tainted in some way, since farmed salmon are not only bad for the health of the consumer, but devastating to the environment.

I'd better quit writing and get to work!!

Back in the Saddle

Whew, it's been a rough summer.  My 91 year old father's health failed in May, he passed away in June, but his memorial service wasn't until July.  Since returning from his funeral, I've been pretty much a hermit, hanging out in my studio and working on a couple pieces, and even painting my studio, but not blogging.  

Piece number one, with the working title of Family Dinner,  has been in the pipeline for a year or so, but I've never gotten past the pattern making stage until now. 

 It's kind of fussy...the wings are made out of dozens of gray-ish fabrics,.  I'm not satisfied with the bird body on the right-hand side--more problems to be solved.

I'm doing a raw edge machine applique, rather than turning under each piece, as I felt the frayed edges were in keeping with the feathery look.   I'm using my usual construction method of tracing sections of my large cartoon onto freezer paper--for instance, the wing on the far right which is about three-quarters finished--then cutting each individual piece out of the freezer paper pattern, ironing it on to the desired fabric, cutting each little piece out, one at a time, placing the little freezer paper piece on the fabric, cutting it out, and placing it back in the the correct space

.Because this quilt is more complex than some of my others, I am determining which side to cut right up to the edge of the pattern, and which side to leave enough of seam allowance to tuck under adjoining pieces as I go.  Sometimes I work all of that out before hand, but I was getting in a muddle, so I just figure out the placement for 4 or 5 pieces at a time, and so far anyway, that seems to be working.

What is different about this project, is I cut a piece of white backing fabric the size of each section.  For example, in the photo above, the each wing and each bird body were handled separately, and a piece of white cotton the exact size of that section is the foundation.  Each small piece of fabric is lightly glued to the the backing fabric which hold it in place until I stitch it.  This solved two problems for me...

• First of all, it gave me a firm foundation for each section that has LOTS of small pieces in it.  I've found with this many small pieces, only slightly attached to each other, with no backing fabric, things can fall apart and seams can open up if there is any strain on the fabric. 
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• Secondly, since I am using a lot of light colored fabrics, it helped with the transparency issue.

 After a section is complete, I use clear mono-filament thread on the top, and 60 wt. cotton thread in a neutral color in the bobbin and free-motion zigzag around each piece.  I've found using the free-motion foot keeps the fabric flatter and avoids the issue of pushing the fabric into a little pleat.  I use a narrow zigzag,  I'd say 1/16th inch or so, or 3 little bars on my Bernina.

Next time:  The second piece I'm working on, which is really messy, because I'm making fish prints as part of the quilt.

Procrastination and Paducah, Kentucky

Dang...has it really been 3 months since I've posted to this blog???  My intentions are good, but when it comes to this blog, I am a very accomplished procrastinator. 

I'm really only posting now to shamelessly brag about my little quilt...Requiem for 42,000 Trees, a quilt to commemorate the plane trees  that line the Canal du Midi in France.  The trees are dying because they are infected with an incurable disease and will all be cut down in the next year or two.   I can't imagine what the canal will look like without the trees that line it for mile upon mile. 

I made this little quilt  to be part of a SAQA (Studio Art Quilters Association) traveling trunk show.  From the 400+ quilts SAQA received for the trunk show, they choose 50 to become part of the permanent collection at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky.  A lot of the quilts in the permanent collection are in storage, and not on exhibit, so I have no idea if or when my quilt will be on display. 

I'm honored to have the tiniest quilt I've ever made end up in epicenter of the quilt world. 

Seagulls, Sketchbook Pro, and PosteRazor

18"x38" sketch, ready to make a pattern for my quilt

Bird of the Year
A friend gave me a book for Christmas called Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.  Haupt writes that your personal bird of the year is the first bird you see on New Year's Day--so in all likelihood, that bird will be an ordinary, every day, kind of bird.  The idea is to observe and study your bird of the year, and discover that there is no such a thing as an ordinary bird, or for that matter, ordinary anything.  Since I live on the shoreline of Puget Sound, my first bird sighting of the year was the ever-present seagull.  I have quickly fallen in love with these very intelligent, family oriented birds that I've taken for granted for too many years.

Sketchbook Pro for Drawing
When I become enamoured with something, it usually means some quilts aren't far behind.  Before the New Year, I had already planned out one large piece featuring seagulls feeding on a bait ball, (shown in an earlier post) but since I haven't collected enough fabrics to start work on that large-ish piece, I drew up this smaller sketch, using a photo I took on New Year's morning.  To produce the sketch I used two pieces of software that I really like.

First of all, I used a drawing app called  Sketchbook Pro on my iPad.   It's an app that costs about $4.99 (at least when I bought it a couple years ago.)  Like Photoshop, the app has layers, the ability to import photos, merge them, use a wide variety of drawing tools, save multiple versions, and export the final product to iPhoto.   I use a stylus on the iPad, and it's almost as comfortable as a pencil.  I love that I can "pinch it big" when I want to work on a detailed portion of a drawing.  I used to haul around  a large sketchbook, pens, pencils, a small set of watercolors and a camera every where I went--I looked ready to scale Everest.  Now I just take my iPad.  It's got it all plus GPS so I can get home after wandering around.

PosteRazor for Printing it BIG
I used to go through all kinds of gyrations trying to enlarge my drawings to the size I wanted for a quilt--I've used overhead projectors, opaque projectors, grid enlargements, and Kinkos.  But not any more thanks to a FREE (my favorite price) on-line program called PosteRazor.  (There are probably other programs like this one, but this is the one I found first, and really like.)  When I have a sketch that makes me itch to start cutting fabric, I export the sketch from Sketchbook Pro to iPhoto, and then import it to  PosteRazor--a very easy process.

Once imported into PoasteRazor, the program asks you to select the size you want your image to be, and it then automatically converts the image to a PFD--all you have to do is hit the print button, and out comes your drawing on umpteen sheets of 8.5x11 paper.  I don't know the upper size limits for printing, but I've had not trouble printing 5'x6' foot images.  That's plenty big enough for my needs.   It is a bit of a pain to tape all the sheets of paper together, and my main advice is DO NOT let the stack of papers get out of order under any circumstances, or you will become as looney as a box of frogs.  (You can enlarge any image, including photos, but you'll mow through a whole lot of printer ink if you print a photo.)

Although it takes a bit of time to assemble all the pages of the printout, it takes FAR less time than dinking around with a jiggly overhead projector image or going to the mainland to visit Kinkos.  This printout becomes my master drawing.  It's what I use to make my freezer paper patterns.  Unlike my hand drawn master patterns from the days of yore, if I mess this one up, the PosteRazor PFD is saved on my computer so I can print another.  Yippee.